When you run out
What stops when the allowance is used, what keeps working, and what to do about it.
WARNING
Harmony-routed model credits and a weekly inference allowance are not for sale. This describes a planned gateway product. It is not Harmony Cloud.
Running out of allowance is a normal state, not a failure. Here is exactly what changes and what does not.
What stops
Only one thing: model requests routed through the Harmony gateway.
What keeps working
Everything else, which is most of Harmony:
- Your own API keys. Requests go straight from your machine to the provider. They do not pass through our servers, so nothing we do can stop them.
- Local models. No account, no network, no gateway.
- Third-party agent harnesses. Harmony launches the vendor's own CLI, which authenticates itself.
- The whole application — terminals, orchestration, worktrees, A2A, everything that is not a Harmony-provided model call.
This is not a courtesy. It is structural: the free product does not depend on our servers, so it cannot be taken away by a billing state or by our infrastructure failing.
Your options
| Wait | The allowance resets every 7 days. harmony usage shows exactly when. |
| Use purchased credits | If you have any, they are used automatically once the allowance is gone. |
| Buy credits | These do not expire. |
| Use your own key | Works immediately, costs you nothing extra through us. |
| Use a local model | Free, offline. |
If the gateway is down
Same picture, for a different reason. Your own keys and local models are unaffected, because those requests never involved us.
If a request fails because our gateway is unavailable, you are not charged and any credits reserved for it are released.
What we will not do
- Charge you automatically without a ceiling you set. Automatic top-up is off unless you enable it, and enabling it requires an upper bound.
- Stop the application working. There is no state in which running out of credits disables Harmony.
- Retroactively bill you for a run we under-charged. That is our accounting error to absorb.